Monthly Archives: August 2012

Hotter than July? If any of us had thought Stevie Wonder was an Aussie that track title said either he came from Darwin – yeah right! – or he weren’t from down under…

Winter is a time for getting your work done, getting the heating going and cuddling up… assuming you have someone to cuddle up with. It’s also a time for going and checking out new bands, new movies and apparently the peak time for relationships to bust up.

The song ‘You Broke My Heart’ has been living with me for two years now. Breathing in my ear. Looking at me over my shoulder. Nagging at me. I still find it hard to sing without choking…even alone…that is very weird indeed. It’s not even really autobiographical. It’s about you…it’s about me feeling what you are going through….and you is anyone going through that pain of being separated from the one you love, either by circumstances or because the other has just gone gone gone, as the righteous Brothers said.

So I challenged myself to put images to what happens when I sing the song. I love singing it and I love the depth of feeling it brings out in me. I love the way it makes me feel and taste the world. It’s very black and white imagery but very strong. It makes me love my lover even more. It makes me want to hold on and cherish everything I have and it makes me cry…

So out comes the video camera. Makeshift tripod [don’t ask!], makeshift lighting [don’t ask!] wait for the right sky/mood/girlfriend/feeling…and do it hungry…like I was when the song was written…bloody starving, and I don’t even remember why…i think we just didn’t have any food and I wasn’t about to stop.

What I like about this particular version of ‘You Broke my Heart’ is that it was sung the same day the song was written so everything is absolutely raw…i’m experiencing the emotion for pretty well the first time. I sang incredibly quietly [really really quietly, couldn’t do that in a live show] and had to work real hard to control my voice at that volume…which made the whole effort of singing it about ten times as draining as if I’d been belting it out in an arena…very weird.

So got the camera out…set it up on the Eranopod, trod on the lens cap and broke it into three pieces….thought it was rubber…ho hum…and just pushed at my creative envelope whatever that is. The result is this film which is very personal, very intimate, very naked. I’m incredibly grateful to Nabila for being there, to the sky for being there and to you for being there making me want to write the song, sing the song, video the song, put up the song and pray that it means something somewhere.

I do not like being proud. I don’t like it as a concept and I don’t like it as a character trait in me or in other people. Not at all. But I’m quite proud of this little 3 minutes of me but I hand it over to you to keep.